Yeah, Palladian, I feel the same way every time Spider-Man or Superman gets married, or dies, or whatever. In fact, I dare say the illusion of story progression usually ends up damaging things by making the pointlessness of reading it all the more transparent.

But back to Archie, I suspect he's just angling for Veronica's dad to pay him off so he can run off to San Francisco with Reggie.

Or he's planning to gaslight Veronica.

Or he's going to hire Moose to murder Veronica so he can inherit the money and then betray moose so he can run off with Midge. That's what I would do, anyway.

When I was a little kid, I read Archie comic books at the barber shop while I was waiting for my father to get his hair cut.

I always had a thing for Veronica; no offense to Betty. But it always seemed to me that the day would come when I would grow up, and I would come home early from the office, and I’d find Veronica full of Valium and booze, out by the swimming pool, naked, thrashing wildly, deep at the center of a nasty Guatamalen cluster fuck, barking orders whenever she could catch her breath.

And at that precise moment I would realize why our landscaping always looks so much better than that of our neighbors.

That’s pretty much why I think Archie is making the right decision here.

How often does a schlub like Archie get to choose between two girls like Veronica and Betty? That's like asking Tom Ewell to choose between Marilyn Monroe and Ava Gardner. The very fact that you have such a choice to make is paradise enough.....In high school most choices are between the bad and the truly awful. Maybe that's the appeal of Archie. It's a utopian vision.

Spider man is no longer married as he literally made a deal with the devil (Mephisto in Marvel) to save his Aunt May who had been shot to death by a sniper aiming for Peter who had announced his identity to the public during the massive (and crappy) Civil War crossover. In exchange for his marriage and all memories of it Mephisto would bring back his aunt and Peter Parker would be a bachelor again. This all occurred in a story entitled One More Day.

Apparently Joe Quesada (editor in chief of Marvel) hated the concept of a married Spiderman and thought it prevented readers from relating to him; so an editorial mandate was issued. However, the choice was panned by pretty much everybody and even the author (J. Michael Straczynski of Babylon 5) threatened to take his name off the book.

Now if you want to see some serious progression and death issues you should look at DC and all their Batfamily characters. There have been 4 different Robins: 1 died and came back during Infinite Crisis; 1 was tortured and died but was later retconned back to life.

Batman himself is currently only around 33 years old despite all of his adventures. He's also thought dead (killed by Darkseid during Final Crisis) but was really shifted to another dimension where he currently is living in a cave.

But you're right in that this will all be undone within the next two or three years and never be spoken of again.

jayne_cobb: thanks for that great summary. I couldn't make a dent in Infinite Crisis (Infinite Comic Sales, I figured). I remember when that kicked off, I came to the shop for my comics folder and there were something like 20 comics in there, and my bill was $100 - what the heck? As you said, in two years no one will remember this, so I bailed on that whole thing.

Only he's not as smart as he thinks he is, and the 'brainless oaf' (Jughead) he got for a roommate thinking he could frame him in an emergency is actually not as dumb as Reggie thinks he is, and tips off the feds.

Reggie goes to prison and when he gets there he finds Moose, who is doing 40-to-life for armed robbery and aggravated assault, and Moose wins Reggie playing a game of cards. After ripping out all his chest and facial hair by the roots and wearing a dress, Moose satisfies himself, renames Reggie "Regina" and rents him out to anyone who can smuggle him a pack of cigarettes.

Meanwhile Jughead takes the reward money and starts a wildly successful hamburger restaurant (nobody makes 'em better) and proposes to the jilted Betty, while Archie divorces Veronica on the same day Jughead and Betty begin their fifty years of bliss.

How often does a schlub like Archie get to choose between two girls like Veronica and Betty?

That segues into another question I've had -- who's the target market for comics like Archie? You'd think it's men, who can relate to the everyman/nonentity title character (at least, as far as I understand him -- I think I've read something like one Archie comic in my entire life, and that when I was little; everything I know is by cultural osmosis and wikipedia), but do men (or boys or whatever) really read Archie?